Do you want to be able to choose your audience, and get more of them listening?
Grab a drink and a comfortable seat. You may even want to print this out. We're going in.
Hi,
First, a quick story about organic expectations
When I uploaded my first ever piece of 'podcast' audio online in May 2001, (without use of an RSS feed at this stage, ironically) I was absolutely staggered when I saw the number "1219" next to the play button, the next morning.
I remember that exact number of downloads because it's been burned into my memory and even formed up a few characters in many of my passwords over the years.
Even today, many Indie podcasters would be delighted to see that number of listeners in their podcast host's dashboard at all, let alone after one day.
Now, let's be totally honest around this seemingly epic result.
It wasn't like I was building a brand new show out of nowhere. I uploaded this episode on my DJ page on the radio station I worked for at the the time. A radio show I was getting 1 million listeners per week tuning in to.
And I'd mentioned the same afternoon that I would be uploading the audio, after the show. So my audience was primed.
The reality is, of the roughly 140,000 live listeners, only 0.8% of my potential downloaders, actually carried out my call to action.
Which is pretty much spot-on in terms of off podcast to on podcast conversion rates.
But let's be real here.
You're not starting from 1 million impressions per week to convert from.
You're probably not even starting from 1 million impressions per month.
And unless you're an influencer, hitting 1 million impressions per year would probably be a good year in your analytics.
So how do you get an equal number of downloads per episode for your podcast without a million people to pitch to?
Let's figure this out.
The reality of podcast discovery
If you know anything about me, you're probably aware I often mock the so-called 'podcast strategists' and 'coaches' on social media who claim that discovery in podcasting apps is "broken".
I disregard these people as 'experts' entirely, because for me, the quickest way to demonstrate that someone knows nothing about a thing, is when that person claims the thing can't be done, before moving on to something else they perceive as easier or more possible.
In 2024, most if not all of the main podcast strategists and influencers on LinkedIn were claiming that YouTube is better for "discovery" and that's where everyone needed to move their podcast to.
As a video.
The important fact they'd forgotten to include was that they were basing this generalised dismissal of podcast audio on their own results. Yet, their sycophantic followers continued to offer them unbridled support around their frankly inaccurate messaging, and obediently endorsed the strategy of quitting the tried and tested format in favour of competing in a much larger pool that's been overran by millions of existing far more experienced swimmers.
The truth is that podcast discovery isn't broken. You just need to know how to get your podcast discovered. And that takes learning and practice.
The Tortoise - Podcast SEO
When it comes to explaining audio podcast marketing, this really is as simple as the classic tale of the tortoise and the hare.
Quite the spry tortoise actually, bruh
In case you don't know the story, I'll summarise it for you now.
The tortoise and the hare enter a race. Everyone laughs at the tortoise because it's competing against a creature that's known for its sheer speed and enjoys its nature-given advantage.
Sure enough, the starting gun goes off and the hare speeds off in the distance so confidently, it ends up taking a nap. But it oversleeps and finds the tortoise won.
Here's how the folklore plays into the reality of your desire - to get more listeners to your podcast.
You can be the tortoise.
This means you show up as you have been, dedicating yourself to recording content and publishing it, all the while telling as many people as you can, using your same old limited marketing methods of social media posts, mentions of it at networking events, and promo swapping.
All in the hope that one day, you'll arrive on that sweet, sweet day when people start to notice your show, and tell their friends about it.
Quick note - promo swapping
Doing promo swaps on podcasts doesn't work as well as the people running the email lists would have you believe it does. For a start, how would you feel if some random just started getting advertised on your favourite podcast? Would you bother listening?
The Hare - Podcast SEO
Alternatively, you can be the hare.
This means you have the opportunity to get closer to the finish line more quickly, using your nature given advantage - the ability to earn and spend money. But, with a subtle difference. You use your advantage strategically, and don't get caught napping on the fundamentals.
More on that later...
But for now, yes, , it's time for the unfortunate truth - if you want podcast 'fame', you've either got to wait until you eventually earn it (if at all), or you've got to pay for it.
The truth about 'successful podcasts'
Think of any recently-launched podcast that's perceived as successful. I'll wait.
Right now, if you're British you're probably thinking "Diary of a CEO".
If you're in the US, you're likely picturing Mel Robbins.
Either works.
Here's what most people think about both of those shows - they're seen as successful because they have lots of followers ready to listen.
Here's the inconvenient truth - they're seen as successful because they've taken steps to ensure they're seen as successful.
It's the same 'science' that means everyone talks about a new movie when it comes out, or a new Netflix show the same month it's released, or even, staggeringly, how a washed up Robbie Williams can have both a top 10 movie about his life, and a number 1 album based on the movie, nearly two decades after he was last relevant.
There is no science.
It's called 'buying your fans'.
And although it's a strategy that's favoured by everyone from Hollywood movie distributors through to breweries, it's one that's open to absolutely anyone with content and a budget.
Now, I'm going to explain how they do it, and how you can do it with a fraction of their budget.
Want to speed up your production workflow? This'll help!
Click to learn more about how you can reduce your editing time to a fraction of what you were spending before
Big podcasters - the spray and pray method
You actually have a distinct advantage over those other shows with massive audiences. That's IF you're willing to learn from the Hare's mistakes.
See, bigger shows work with large podcast agencies. And agencies are there to do one job.
Get you audience. Well, that is to say, give you the perception of growing your audience for you.
And when you're a big name celebrity, you can't leave anything to chance. Your reputation and credibility is on the line. So you pay the agencies to deliver, and deliver they do. And it usually leads to sponsorship and advertising. I mean, why wouldn't it? They're celebrities, and it seems their magic touch also applies to their podcast!
But what if you're not a celebrity, but a big brand?
You still don't want to leave anything to chance? Right?
So you also work with a podcast agency that promises to get you listeners. You won't ask too many questions. As long as they can get you the listeners, you'll be happy.
I know of one podcast marketing agency which boasts about their talent for getting their clients millions of downloads across their portfolio, and placed into the charts, and regularly uses their perceived industry clout for 'notice me' marketing. The truth is a little ickier.
They're paying bot farms in Bangladesh and the Philippines to artificially inflate the download numbers in their clients' dashboards.
Because of the absolute naivete of the corporate world when it comes to podcasting, nobody within the executive suite has the cogency to challenge the validity of these results, and so everyone is seemingly happy.
The brand's satisfied they have 'millions of downloads'.
The podcast agency's satisfied they can afford to pay their staff again thanks to huge margins.
The listener's happy, because, well, they don't really exist, so there's nothing to be unhappy about!
And this continues for a few months, until said brand realises - "Hey, we've got all these listeners. Why is our content not converting? Why aren't we booking any sales calls?"
It's at this point that the podcast marketing agency realises it's been rumbled, and begins gaslighting the client.
"Perhaps it's an issue with your sales team and their processes? We've delivered you all the traffic. We can't control what you do with it!"
Roll forward another month, and the relationship sours, the podcast gets dismissed as 'ineffective' and then referred to as a 'short run series of a few episodes'.
This strategy is more commonly used than you might think, and it's why you'll see these people popping up on Instagram every week. Surely a successful business doesn't need to do aggressive marketing for 50 weeks of the year? Well, quite.
They're not successful.
They're just fraudsters who are trading on innocence.
The thing is, there's a far smarter way to build audience. And it's how we choose to work at Podknows when helping clients grow their audiences.
I hate to break it to you, but there's no magic bean set that can miraculously grow your podcast audience.
Here's what it takes - and spoiler alert, it's absolutely more boring than you'd been hoping.
Time and planning
Creativity - for the asset creation
Willingness to set up data capture
Willingness to run analysis and tests based on that data capture
Processes in place to iterate
Budget
You'll note that at no point have I mentioned logging into any secret websites that have all the beautiful hidden listeners stashed away that you've been yearning for.
Let me elaborate more on the dull stuff, because thankfully I find it really interesting and I'm hoping that if I share that interesting stuff, some of it might rub off on you. Or, you'll just scroll to the end and find the part where I offer to just do all this for you...
Time and planning - what, you think you can just jump straight in and grab these audiences? No, it's not as simple as that. First off, you've got to figure out the places where your ideal audiences are most likely hanging out, and create a plan to meet them where they are, with the kind of lead magnets they'll want. Estimated time for task - 4 hours per campaign
Creativity - I really hope you've got years of content production experience, because you're going to need to know what to focus in on when it comes to creating the magnets. It might be a video clip, an audiogram with an image, or even a downloadable PDF. Whatever it is, you'll have already figured that out in step 1, right?
Data capture - there's little point trying to find new audience if you're not measuring whether you're getting results or not. We use a range of tools to track this, but you can quite easily get an idea from your platform analytics.
Analysis - you hate spreadsheets, I hate spreadsheets, but the truth is, you've got to get good at tracking data in an organised fashion if you want to get a grasp of what's working and therefore you should do more of, and what's not working, and you should just kill.
Processes - if you don't have a team or you're time poor, this part's going to be the trickiest. But you'll need to put the positive findings from step 4 into a repeatable process so you can continue to improve your results.
Budget - I'm not going to sugar coat it for you, you won't have the ability to do any of this if you haven't already spent at least a little bit of marketing budget on getting the data in the first place. The good news is we're not talking thousands. And most of the major investment is front loaded, meaning you can scale back once you get into your groove. But you'll need to be comfortable with what seems like throwing some money away on poor results, and staying on the bull while it bucks, until it steadies and starts letting you enjoy some obviously improved results you can ride until the end of time. The spread of budgets I'm putting down for clients varies from £500 per month for very modest results that will take longer, all the way up to £10,000 per month for a *chart-topping show that's getting hundreds of thousands of downloads per month, and generating solid revenue.
*Or at least it would be topping the chart if charts actually measured listener data rather than pointless things like how many new followers a show gets in a given period...
An example of how this works using a real client case study - The Rock Fight
I'm pretty sure that Colin True and the TRF team won't mind me talking about this - any mention of what they're doing is always welcome, because they understand how this works. The more people are talking about you, the more chance there is that someone will listen.
Colin approached me a couple of years ago to help him grow his podcast because he had ambitions of making his podcast his full time job.
He'd come from the outdoor industry marketing space and had a purposeful mission with his show - to have conversations the collars and ties in his industry weren't willing to have on their podcasts.
After an audit of his show to establish the potential of scaling his content to more ears, I decided he had what it takes, and following a short test campaign to establish his CTR (click through rate) despite initially disappointing results (0.3%) we persevered, and we've since got this up to 60%.
Since working with us, The Rock Fight has grown from a little podcast averaging around 150 listens per month on a good day, to a show where if he was now getting that number of downloads to an episode after even just a couple of days, he'd be panicking that something was up.
Here's how we've approached his show growth.
Get ready to copy and paste this into a doc if you want to DIY this.
Figured out TRF's main keywords - especially the long tail ones - and started guiding him to improved podcast SEO with his titling.
Work with TRF on content to make for their asset publishing. We settled on verticals which my team could then repurpose as needed. These are then uploaded to YouTube in unlisted mode for hosting, and mirrored in Google Ads for their YouTube display network.
Identify the main areas of interest for his content - (for interest, these are Alaska, Colorado, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Wyoming) to give us a broad audience profile to shoot for in collecting our base data.
Identify the most popular media channels for these areas, and split campaign spending up between them. Eg - New Hampshire has a large podcast listening profile, so we spent more on in app advertising there.
Set up landing page for conversions in our PPC platforms like Meta, LinkedIn, Google etc, and created tracking pixels and tags to follow them in house.
Turned on the asset placements for our exclusive Podknows Display Network offering (embedding our client's players in highly relevant random places on the internet that we have advertising agreements with)
When it comes to number 6, I'm sure you'll want to know what that looks like. So here it is.
(This could be placed on any one of around 1.2 million websites at any moment.)
That's the PPC stuff explained, but what else?
Ahh how very astute of you. Yes, this is all the typical Pay Per Click traffic campaign stuff explained. And frankly, anyone can do all this, although we're very experienced with it, and can do it way more cheaply than you will. Think around 29-45 pence per new listener and simultaneous follow, versus the average inexperienced person ending up paying around £1.50 for each new listener after all the initial set up and testing (without also enjoying the benefits of a follow).
Yes, I'm flexing, because I've earned the right to do so.
With number 6, and the Podknows Display Network offering - we've built that so it's something we're able to do that others aren't. Unless they set up their own system!
But I was keen to make this email about the things you can copy and recreate, so let's get back to that.
In app advertising.
There are many podcast players that offer promotional advertising opportunities if you're willing to pay. These will cost anywhere between 80p and £4 per listen so they ain't cheap. But the good news is, you're more likely to get loyal listeners from them. Because you're reaching them where they're already in the mindset of listening, versus following for later.
For the best opportunities, look to:
Overcast
PocketCasts
Podbean
I cannot in good conscience recommend Spotify Studio Ads or Buzzsprout ads. And I mentioned why in this episode.
Why the reference to the tortoise with all this? Seems the hare trashes it?
Great question.
The hare indeed gets there more quickly with this method in terms of finding new listeners. But the smart people approaching this like the tortoise will also be maintaining their organic SEO so they can maintain growth when they turn the audience growth off.
The podcast we've highlighted in this email (The Rock Fight) has now reached a point where even without promotion, each episode is getting a nice healthy audience each episode.
In fact, over the winter break, the show drastically pulled back it's budgets for marketing while it aligned other elements of the business. And truthfully, while the growth has visibly steadied, it's not fallen off a cliff.
By being brilliant at what we do, we've risked doing ourselves out of a gig.
And frankly, that's exactly the position we want ourselves in.
Realising all this is a bit 'much' and need my help?
I can help you and your podcast to get these kinds of results. But not before we've established whether your show is ready for promotion. Not every show is. While it would be the easiest thing in the world for me to take your money, and waste it on a show that I know won't benefit from it, I actually want you to get new listeners as cheaply as possible from the start.
And to help you to do that, I need to carry out a podcast improvement audit.
This is where I study your show, and let you know all the ways in which you can improve your show, and the opportunities available to you when you do.
I offer two options for this. The main audit is £400 and includes a written report, a video report summarising the findings, and a follow up one to one call to discuss in greater detail any particular points you wish to.
I also offer a 'lite' version where you still get a written report, and a shorter but equally useful video version, but without the follow up call (which may actually suit time-poor people).